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Games Are Not For Children Alone

© Julie J. Murelle

When I was growing up, we had no technology in my house. Yes, we had a phone,(with a round dialer) a refrigerator, stove etc, but none of it was high tech. In the days of MTV and video recorders, we had a black and white, 13 inch TV without a remote. When I left for college at 18, we still had the same group of technology.

When I got married, a completely new world of technology opened up to me. We had a VCR, an answering machine, a typewriter, (a writer's dream) and a car that I could stop without having to drag my feet on the cement like the Flintstones. Life for me had begun. Then a couple years later, we made the big purchase. We bought a computer. I think our first one had four megs of RAM and no CD rom drive. After about a month of not seeing my husband (because he spent every waking moment on the computer), we bought our first computer game. He had just installed another four megs of RAM and now that we had eight our system could handle an actual game.

My husband lost interest in this aspect of the computer rather quickly but I was the one who could not stop playing. Chasing things around on the screen, colors blasting everywhere, moving level to level, just from my skill. It was a rush!

From that point on, I loved computer games and I found that they were great stress relievers for me. I would come home from a long night of waitressing and I would plop myself down and get lost in the world of Doom or Corridor 7. A couple of years ago, I received Nintendo 64 for Christmas. During one particularly stressful time in my life I actually finished the entire Zelda game.

Games are a great way to forget your troubles for a while. You can play ones that you have to think to play, such as Freecell, Spite and Malice (www.spiteandmalace.com) or Chess. You can play mindless ones, like Poppit on Aol or Snood (www.snood.com). Although you have to pay to get full versions of Spite and Malice and Snood, you can download trial versions of these at their respective websites. Of course there are the shooting ones but my favorite type is the ones where there is a story and you have to figure stuff out and it goes many places. It is like being transferred to another world for a bit.

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